We’ve long celebrated the decision-making and strategic brilliance of business leaders like Steve Jobs, Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. Inspirational quote cards and videos flood social media timelines, fabled stories are passed from person to person praising the prowess of these great leaders.

A new book argues that one artist deserves to be put in the upper echelons of genius with the aforementioned figures. This is someone who has changed the music industry forever. They are also a woman.

And while for many, 2024 was shaped by global elections, brat summer and epic sporting events, for others it was the year of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. It featured 151 sold-out shows across five continents and 21 countries. Videos, pictures and friendship bracelets from the shows permeated the cultural zeitgeist.

The tour also grossed nearly $2bn, almost twice as much as the next highest-grossing, Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres, which started in 2022 and is ongoing. Some estimates suggest that Swift’s 15 UK shows boosted the economy by nearly £1bn.

“It may be a controversial statement to some, saying that she’s even more impressive than Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos,” says Kevin Evers, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review and author of There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift. “But look at the industry she’s operating in.”

Since she released her self-titled debut album in 2006, the music landscape has morphed from CDs to Napster to iTunes to Spotify. And Swift has morphed too. She is not afraid to change her sound and music, often doing so in the face of received wisdom about how an artist should build and sustain their popularity.

Headstrong vision

“There’s a quote very early on in the book from Swift where she says, ‘anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, I just want to do it more’,” says Evers, who took two and a half years to write the book.

This is exemplified in her first album. At the age of 15, Swift left a development deal with the Sony-owned RCA Records because she wanted to write her own songs. Having been stuck in songwriting rooms with men three or four times her age, she realised this wouldn’t happen under the deal.

Swift decided instead to sign with a start-up label. It was run by Scott Borchetta, formerly of Universal Music Group, and had no HQ, no funding and, at the time, didn’t even have a name. Borchetta and his freshly minted Big Machine Records backed Swift and allowed her not only to write her own songs but to write songs for her peers – teenage girls.

“The consensus in country music radio and among executives at major labels was there’s no audience for teenage girls,” says Evers.

But the bet paid off. The album spent 24 weeks at number one on the Country Albums chart in the US and she became the first female country artist to write or co-write every song on a platinum-certified debut album.

The strategy worked because of what is known as a “blue ocean”. This is what the strategy gurus W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne call a completely untapped market. (A bloody “red ocean” is where competitors fight over the same customers.) The same tactic was used by Marvel in the 1960s, which decided to tailor its comic book offering to an audience of university students and young adults.

“She made a lot of bold decisions based on her vision,” Evers says. “I look back at old interviews with executives and people who were around her at the time and they all point out that they’ve never seen someone at that age who had such a clear vision of what she wanted to do.”

Radical risks

Success requires taking risks, and this is a tightrope Swift has navigated perfectly. “She tends to take those risks at times when you wouldn’t think that she would need to take them,” says Evers. “It’s usually she takes those risks when she’s at her peak – when her success and popularity are really high.”

An example of this is her decision to leave country music behind and move into pop. This was a big risk because it wasn’t just about changing her sound and how she made her music. She was also leaving behind a market and a fan base that she had built strong relationships with.

“That market was not going to come along with her and play her pop music, but she did it anyway,” says Evers. “That was a risk but she felt personally that this was the way her music needed to move. And it paid off.”

1989 was her first pop album, featuring tracks like Shake It Off, Blank Space and Bad Blood. It won Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards, while Rolling Stone put it on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Another example of risk-taking came after the fallout from her well-documented masters dispute. In 2019, Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records was sold to Ithaca Holdings, a company owned by talent manager Scooter Braun, who managed artists such as Ariana Grande, Kanye West and Demi Lovato.

As part of the deal, Braun got the masters of Swift’s first six studio albums. But Swift wanted to reclaim ownership of her music, so she re-recorded them. She has so far released four of the six. Not only that, but it sparked an international debate on intellectual property, private equity and industrial ethics that continues today.

“She made a huge deal over the fact that her past recordings were sold but that wasn’t a shoo-in because fans in particular had such close relationships with her former music and she was essentially telling them, ‘don’t listen to my old music, only listen to my new versions’,” says Evers.

“If it was a failure, Swift would have looked pretty bad, right? But I think it ended up being successful because of the way that she communicated to her fans and how important this was to her. Those re-records actually brought in new fans and accelerated her growth and popularity, especially in an age of streaming.”

Customer obsessed

After the release of her 1989 album, Swift appeared on The Graham Norton Show and revealed that she had invited fans to her house for a secret listening party. She would monitor the social media accounts of multiple fans for months before inviting them into her home to listen to her latest offering. She has also famously sent fans Christmas presents and hand-written notes.

“She’s incredibly fan-obsessed,” says Evers. “Everyone knows that you should be obsessed with your customers but I’m not sure so many people go to the lengths that Swift does to delight her customers: her fans. She understands that superstars aren’t self-made. They’re created by the fans and everything that she does is about her fans.

“Look at The Eras Tour. It was a culmination of the last two decades of her career. She could have played a greatest hit-style show playing 25 to 30 songs and I think her fans would have walked away happy. Instead, she plays 40-plus songs for over three and a half hours, devoting a mini-set to every album of her career [except for her debut]. She’s always pushing to grow, she’s always pushing to adapt, but she’s also pushing to really delight her fans in new ways.”

The importance of resilience

On September 13, 2009, the eyes of the music world were on Radio City Music Hall in New York. Swift was announced as the winner of Best Female Video for You Belong with Me, pipping Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).

As she is delivering her acceptance speech, Kanye West storms on stage, takes the microphone from her and says, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” This becomes a huge viral moment, with controversy fuelled by the hyper-growth of Twitter.

“Essentially, you had Kanye West who was the most innovative rapper of that time saying, ‘You don’t belong here. You’re not talented enough’,” says Evers. “That was a very devastating moment for Swift, but I think what followed is even more important. At the time, she was getting very criticised for not having a great voice, for having a princess fixation and for having twee lyrics. But after that controversy, she didn’t try to change who she was. She doubled and tripled down on what she does best.

“She decided to write her third album Speak Now entirely by herself. I’d argue that album is one of the most intimate and vulnerable that she’s released. She decides, ‘I’m going to play into my strengths and then I’m also going to turn that into a story for my fans.’

“This is what she’s done her entire career. She’s gone through pretty big controversies and challenges, but she finds a way to make those into moments of empowerment for her and her fans. She’s not only resilient, I’d argue that she’s anti-fragile, meaning that she doesn’t only withstand pressure and criticism, she actually grows stronger from them. I think that’s a big reason for her success and longevity.”

Kevin Evers’ book There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift is available now.

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